Background

Tu Youyou was born on December 30, 1930, in the city of Ningbo, on China's east coast. Her father worked in a bank and her mother was a housewife. Youyou had four brothers.

Education

Youyou was educated at private schools. At age 15, she was forced to take a two-year break from schooling when she contracted tuberculosis. Her recovery from tuberculosis left her determined to pursue a career in medicine.

She completed her schooling in 1951 at Ningbo High School, then, age 20, passed the entrance exam allowing her to enroll at Peking University Medical School’s Department of Pharmacology. In 1955, age 24, Youyou Tu graduated with a degree in Pharmacology.

Career

In 1955, Tu Youyou was hired by the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine. She began researching Lobelia chinensis an herb traditionally used to treat schistosomiasis (also known as bilharzia) and Radix Stellariae a root traditionally used to treat fevers.

China's Cultural Revolution began in 1966, when Marxist fanatics declared intellectuals to be the "Stinking Old Ninth," placing them in nine black-listed categories with other "offenders" such as landlords, right-wingers, and people who wanted to take China on a capitalist road. Universities and schools came under pressure or were shut.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates the number of people murdered by the Chinese government during the Cultural Revolution at five to ten million. Large numbers of ethnic minority people were targeted and killed. Government policies also led to famines in which 30 to 40 million Chinese peasants starved to death. The Cultural Revolution revolution ended in 1976.

In the Cultural Revolution's climate of fear Tu kept her head down.

In early 1969, the Chinese government appointed her as head of research of Project 523, seeking a cure for malaria. Although by this time most scientific research work in China had been stopped, military-related research continued. North Vietnam had requested help from China with malaria, which was taking a heavy toll on its armed forces in the Vietnam War.

American forces were also suffering badly from malaria and researchers in the West had tested over 200,000 chemical compounds looking in vain for an effective treatment for the disease. The single-celled parasite that causes malaria, Plasmodium falciparum, had become resistant to the standard treatment with chloroquine.

China's southern provinces were plagued by malaria, and Tu was sent to China's Hainan Island where the disease was endemic. Tu began traveling around China, searching for ancient texts that mentioned treatments for fevers - particularly recurring fevers, which are a feature of malaria. In three years her project team screened over 2,000 traditional treatments and tested 380 herbal extracts on mice. In 1971, they found an extract of the plant Artemisia annua, whose common English name is sweet wormwood, which was highly effective in suppressing Plasmodium falciparum parasites in mice and monkeys.

Tu perfected a low-temperature way to purify the sweet wormwood extract, boosting its effectiveness and dramatically lowering its toxicity. She then successfully tested it on herself and two members of her team, before beginning clinical trials on other people in the fall of 1972. To produce enough of the drug for clinical trials, Tu and her team utilized household equipment: this was necessary because the government had shut down any suitable pharmaceutical facilities for scaled-up drug production. While producing the drug for clinical trials, Tu and members of her team became ill from exposure to toxic solvents.

In 1972, Tu produced the pure pharmaceutical substance, artemisinin, and discovered its chemical structure. In 1973, Tu carried out further experiments on artemisinin and accidentally produced a new drug, dihydroartemisinin.

Artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin have proven to be highly effective in anti-malarial preparations and are now part of the standard treatments worldwide for malaria. In 2015, Youyou Tu won a half-share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her work. Satoshi Omura and William C. Campbell each won one-quarter shares for the therapy they devised for roundworm parasites.

Currently, Tu is the Chief Scientist in the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medical Sciences in Beijing.

Achievements

• In 1973, Tu Youyou produced a highly effective alternative anti-malarial drug called dihydroartemisinin from artemisinin, used to treat malaria, a breakthrough in twentieth-century tropical medicine, saving millions of lives in South China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America.
  
  For her work, Youyou received the 2011 Lasker Award and the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura. Tu is the first Chinese Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine and the first female citizen of the People's Republic of China to receive a Nobel Prize in any category. She is also the first Chinese person to receive the Lasker Award.

Works

More photos

• book

  • From Artemisia annua L. to Artemisinins: The Discovery and Development of Artemisinins and Antimalarial Agents 2017

Politics

Tu Youyou wasn't involved in politics.

Views

In 1969, when she was 39 years old, Tu was appointed head of Project 523. Her first order of business was researching the effects of malaria in situ. And for that, she traveled to Hainan Island in southern China, which was currently experiencing a malaria outbreak of its own.

In those rainforests, Tu witnessed first-hand the disease's devastating toll on the human body.

She had to leave her one-year-old daughter with her parents and put her four-year-old in a nursery. "The work was the top priority so I was certainly willing to sacrifice my personal life," Tu later said. It would be three years before she saw her children again.

Upon their return to Beijing, the team reviewed ancient medical texts to understand traditional Chinese ways of fighting malaria. At that point over 240,000 compounds had already been tested for use in potential antimalarial drugs, and none had worked. Finally, the team found a reference to sweet wormwood, which had been used in China around 400 AD to treat "intermittent fevers," a symptom of malaria.

In 1971, Tu's team isolated one active compound in wormwood that seemed to battle malaria-friendly parasites. They tested extracts of the compound but nothing worked. So Tu returned once more to the ancient text. She wondered whether the active ingredient in wormwood was being damaged when they boiled the wormwood to prepare the solvent, and so she tried another preparation, this time with an ether-based solvent. Since it boils at a lower temperature, the wormwood wasn’t damaged; when she tested it on mice and monkeys, it had a 100 percent success rate.

Tu and two colleagues tested the substance on themselves before testing them on 21 patients in the Hainan Province. All of them recovered.

The following year, Tu's team distilled the compound's active ingredient, artemisinin, and shared their findings. While her work was not published in English until 1979, shortly after in 1981, the WHO, World Bank, and UN each invited her to present her findings on the global stage.

It took two decades, but finally, the WHO recommended artemisinin combination therapy as the first line of defense against malaria. The Lasker Foundation, which awarded Tu its Clinical Medical Research Award in 2011, called the discovery of artemisinin "arguably the most important pharmaceutical intervention in the last half-century."

Tu, for her part, was reluctant to take credit. "I do not want fame," she said. She deflected praise toward her colleagues from modern as well as ancient China. When she accepted the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, her lecture was entitled, "Discovery of Artemisinin: A Gift from Traditional Chinese Medicine to the World." But she was clearly proud of her discovery: "Every scientist dreams of doing something that can help the world."

Quotations: "Chinese medicine will help us conquer life-threatening diseases worldwide, and that people across the globe will enjoy its benefits for health promotion."

"When you are entrusted with an assignment, you do your best."

Membership

• 

  Chinese Academy of Sciences

• 

  Chinese Academy of Engineering

Connections

Tu married Li Tingzhao, a former school classmate and metallurgical engineer. They had two daughters.

Spouse:

Li Tingzhao

References

• Tu Youyou: China's First Nobel Prize Winning Female Scientist by Liping Liu
  2016